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Monthly Archives: August 2013

Junior Achievement South Africa has announced the launch of its new interactive, picture based programme material ensuring that its programmes continue to take the lead in experiential enterprise education in South Africa.

Junior Achievement South Africa (JASA) identified the need to enhance and improve their programme material to ensure that the material remains exciting, interactive and learner driven. The main objective of the improvement was to create interesting learning material for learners through picture based activities that could support existing programme material and improve the understanding of important business concepts.

JASA contracted Trainiac, to develop the new material, a company specialising in visually mapping learning content and crafting discovery-based activities which facilitate faster learning and higher content retention and application. After several months of research and development, Trainiac presented a programme kit for the Mini Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Academy Programmes consisting of:

1. An interactive map representing two entrepreneurial environments:

a. A Junior Achievement mini-company running in a school environment and

b. A properly functioning production business in a real-world environment.

These environments illustrate the various functions of several business processes in both a JA mini-company and an actual production business. Eg. different management positions and their roles and responsibilities, various ways of acquiring start-up capital and methods of product quality control.

2. A game board and activity cards used in a variety of interactive learn-by-doing activities, including a card based business simulation.

The new material is currently being piloted at a Mini Enterprise Programme at Hulwazi Secondary School in Daveyton, funded by Spar South Rand. The pilot phase has been extremely successful and feedback from both learners and facilitators has been excellent! The learners have been eager to participate and the interactive material has ensured that they have enjoyed their programme sessions immensely. Upon completion of the pilot phase, all of JASA’s 2014 Entrepreneurship Academy and Mini Enterprise Programmes will incorporate the new material.

“By providing for our learning material to be even more interactive, not only are we ensuring that we utlitise maximum experiential learning methods in our programmes, we are hoping this will assist in a planned move towards the development of a digital learning platform, which will allow us to scale up and reach learners in deep rural areas where physical programme facilitation is not always possible or practical.” Noted Linda McClure.